A Tale of Two Industries: Travel & Tech

The travel industry is one of the fastest growing industries in the UK. Another booming industry is the technological industry. Coincidentally, this blog article will combine the two, technology and travel! More specifically, we will discuss the importance of having a well-designed travel website with engaging content and efficient functionality.

Travel Websites: The Design

Competition within the travel market is fierce. Therefore, the design of your travel website is imperative. For visitors hitting your website, their first impression will be derived from the design. An eye-catching design will help to turn prospective customers into business. Furthermore, the website needs to be designed in a way that allows for intuitive navigation throughout the site and booking flow.

Call to actions are important. A call to action is a stimulus to encourage or influence behaviour. For example, a call to action could be a button encouraging people to “Search”, “Enquire” or “Book Now”. It is important that your call to actions stand out amongst the other contact to encourage desirable behaviours. Consequently, it is advisable for call to actions to be assigned distinctive colours and hover effects, to encourage interactivity.

Another design consideration is responsiveness. Given technological advancements and the dramatic increase in smartphone usage (66% of us now own a smartphone), users now expect to be able to research and even book holidays via their smartphone. Therefore, it is critical that your travel website is responsive; that is, it adjusts automatically to the user’s device. You can read more about responsive design in our juicy blog article here: https://www.csimedia.net/blog/responsive-design/

Finally, another tip is to prioritise your content so that the most important functionality is near the top of the page. This is so that users see it as soon as they hit the page. Many travel websites will have an attention-grabbing search box positioned near the top of the page, encouraging users to make that search for their next holiday!

Travel Websites: The Content

Your content needs to be interesting and engaging. Of course, this is paramount to any industry. However, within travel, photography and concise copy will have a big influence on a consumer’s likelihood of booking a holiday with you.

You need to sell the location, the culture, the accommodation, the climate, the experience. Cover the marketable aspects of a destination within the photography. Think about why a person would be looking to visit a specific destination, is it renowned for its food, its theatre, the theme parks? For example, if you’re selling Florida, it would be a good idea to have impressive visuals of the beautiful beaches and mega-intense rollercoasters.

Next - does the website provide all the information the customer is looking for? Can the prices for a destination break be easily found, can the user ascertain whether they’re allowed to take their pet? Think about all of the questions a user may ask, and make the answers easily available.

A content management system is vital to be able to easily manage your content (add, edit and delete), especially in an industry as fast-paced and dynamic as travel, where your content needs to fresh.

Travel Websites: Functionality

Travel websites are elaborate and complex beasts. Behind the scenes, there is lots of complex code. The key is to make sure that this complexity is not passed on to the end-user; their transition through the website ought to be as simple and efficient as possible.

Your travel website needs to be capable of handling an entire catalogue of travel packages with all the various permutations and combinations; a user should have the flexibility to build their own, unique holiday package with flights, accommodation, attraction tickets and extras. 

It needs to have a well-designed booking system with payment integration technology, enabling users to make payments efficiently and securely. Furthermore, you will need a system capable of updating availability of your offering.

CSI Media

Travel websites are our bread and butter - we have almost 20 years’ experience in developing travel websites and travel technology including booking systems, tour operator systems, content managed systems for travel websites plus lots of travel and campsite website designs. We develop attractive, user-friendly websites that give you the ability to easily manage your content, along with functional integration including the ability to make bookings and payments in a reliable and secure manner online. Finally, all of our websites are responsive meaning that they respond automatically to the user’s device. You can see some of our previous work here and you contact us here.